Climb Every Mountain.

37. Climb every mountain!

Maria's Mother Superior said it first, climb every mountain until you find your dreams. A little cheesy, maybe, but when you follow her advice literally, suddenly it makes complete sense. We can't go around the mountains and seemingly unsurpassable struggles in life, we have to go over them to see the other side. Mother Superior's words were a foreshadowing of years later when the Von Trapp family would escape from the Nazis over the Alps into Switzerland and freedom. That's whats on the other side: freedom.

Sometimes, as my friends and I hiked up these same Alps in Austria, I felt like the Von Trapp clan in their ponchos and leiderhosen, marching through the patches of snow, breathing in the freshest air I ever breathed. As I climbed, I shed layers of clothes, and along with them, the weight of the stress on my mind. I've never been much of a hiker before then, but the high was addicting, and pretty soon, I found myself pushing to climb more mountains, higher and higher. Once, we randomly scrambled straight up a waterfall on the side of a road, for no reason other than that we wanted to see the top. We often explored the mountains surrounding the Kartause, in the afternoons after classes were over, but that meant it was a race to the top so that we could make in down by dark. More than once, we found a snow and leaf-filled crevice on the way down and would  slide all the way down the side of the mountain on our backsides. Terrifying, especially when you're laughing so hard you can barely breathe or keep your balance the whole way down. Another time, I remember getting a jogging start when the leader of the group set the pace, and before I knew it, I had run full speed down the side of a massive mountain, all the way to the street. That's freedom, my friends. 

Shedding layers. 

After telling the conflicted Maria to find her dream at the top of a mountain, Mother Superior goes on to tell her that it must be "a dream that needs all the love you can give, every day of your life, for as long as you live." What is a dream unless it is something that we are willing to put all of our love into, for the rest of our lives? Real dreams don't end when the love runs out, or when they get boring. Those are merely passing interests and momentary passions. A dream is something that needs our love to make it happen and exist. It is also something that we may never find, if we are too lazy or discouraged to climb through the snow and ice, over the rocks and fallen trees, too reluctant to shed the layers that weigh us down, in order to find what lies at the top. Only then are we that much closer to heaven than we were before. 

Climbing Book Mountain.

Sliding down the crevice!

38. When you are in awe of God and His works, sing praise from the highest mountaintops!

Climbing the waterfall.

Oh, so worth the climb. 

A tradition that my friends and I began in Ireland at the Cliffs of Moher, was to sing praise with our whole hearts and souls, in complete and utter awe and speechlessness of His great creation and the blessing we have in being able to experience it. To name just a few of the incredible places where this happened: Book Mountain in Gaming with the sun setting before us, St. Francis' Hermitage in Assisi (where we were supposed to be dead silent but oh well), other various mountains around Gaming, the top of a waterfall that we climbed in Hallstatt, sometimes just in our room...But always, always a little out of tune.

Those are some of my favorite memories, kept in a special place in my heart, right next to the food.

God and I had many conversations because of those mountains, just like Moses. Minus the trumpets and the thunder.

39. Don't wait for opportunities, look for them.

If I just sat in my room, waiting for people to invite me to travel with them, I probably would have had a perfectly fine semester abroad, going here and there with random people. But the most memorable trips often happened when I ran through the halls yelling things like,"WHO WANTS TO GO SEE POPE FRANCIS WITH ME???" .......ok so that wasn't one of the most successful trips but I DID get to see him so I'd say it was worth it, right?

The point is, if we sit around and wait for something to happen to us, wait for our prayers to be answered, wait for the future to unfold for us, yeah, things will happen. But those opportunities that we actively seek and pursue are the ones that are most formative and show us the most about ourselves and what is most important to us.

One day in Rome, after witnessing the scores of homeless begging and sleeping at every corner of that great and powerful city and wandering the subways, a few of my friends and I decided to follow the idea of one of our friends and bought a few bags of dollar menu items to hand them out to the needy people we came across. Well, what started out as a good way to spend the afternoon, soon became a lesson in humility and perseverance. It began raining, and mysteriously the homeless people that seemed to be everywhere were suddenly nowhere. We split up and started going up and down the streets searching for someone to eat these sandwiches. One woman refused the food entirely. Ok.....I didn't get it. But as we stood on the sidewalk trying to eat these mushy burgers so they wouldn't go to waste, I was glad that I had actively looked for people to minister to, rather than waiting for the opportunity to plop onto my lap (often my method). And it was worth it because of the one hungry, damp homeless woman who got four or five burgers that day, because no one else wanted them. Lesson in humility and perseverance learned, thanks God.

40. Eat vegetables whenever you can, because you never know when there may be NONE. 

I love my veggies. I'll get a huge pile of green beans for dinner and I'm happy to eat them all and the ones my five siblings leave behind, too. In the Kartause, the only option was usually a reheated, chopped veggie mix, and some limp salad fixings. I probably got most of my vitamins and minerals from spaghetti sauce and the lettuce on the kebabs. When I got back to the States, I ate vegetables almost exclusively for most of the summer to make up for lost time. Despite that binge, I think my body still hasn't forgiven me.

Veggies can be pretty, too. 

You're probably reading this thinking, 'Wow this isn't very deep at all, why is she rambling about veggies for a whole paragraph of this blog?" And my answer to that is, 'I WAS DEPRIVED, OK??"









"He said, "Go forth and stand on the mountain before the LORD." And behold, the LORD was passing by! And a great and strong wind was rending the mountains and breaking in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of a gentle blowing."    1 Kings 19:11-12

A Desert Soul.

So it took me a while to crank out these last few things on the list....but I didn't forget! It's a new year, new blog post...that's a good excuse, right? Ok, good.


33. Don't be afraid to talk about God and what He has done in your life. 

This may seem like a no-brainer to some of you, but let's be honest, there have been moments where you just kept your mouth shut when you could have said something about your faith, however small and passing. It's just so much easier to pretend it will make things more awkward or complicated to mention it. But God should come just as naturally to our lips as news about our family or something that happened to so-and-so the other day.

The good works he performs in our lives are His Divinely wise way of communicating His love, not only to us, but to those we come in contact with. That is why it is totally normal to want to tell the whole world when our prayers have been answered or when we have received some amazing healing experience. This should not and cannot be suppressed. It wells up within us because it is meant to be shared.

Also, we probably have more in common with the people around us than we think.

Austria became a time of sharing stories, experiences and encounters with the Lord that carry on, even now, months later. I still find myself getting fired up to share stories about what He showed me that semester in life-changing places like Auschwitz and Assisi.

34. I am a desert soul without God. 

"Like a deer that longs for running streams, so my soul longs for you, O God." [Ps. 42:1] This thirst for God is only satiated by one thing and one thing only. The endless torrents of living waters that flow from His wounded side. THAT is our source. Without it, our souls would be barren, dusty places, and we would be parched and weak. A deserted place is not fulfilling, useful, or interesting. So why not choose to live where there is an abundance?

And yet God leads us through deserts sometimes. Why? We always want to know why he does this to us. Well, folks, I have the answer so listen closely.

He leads us through the driest and most miserable of deserts, because he's our Shepherd, leading us to the next patch of fresh green grass and the cool, blue lake in the distance. In the land where Jesus preached and called himself the Good Shepherd (John 10:11), there ain't no "verdant pastures." It was cracking, dusty land with lucky patches of grass. The shepherds of the region lead the sheep (or goats as the case may be...) through the dryness to the place where they can be nourished and refreshed, as they still do today. So it is with our Divine Shepherd. It's our own fault if we get lost in the desert part in between.

If you don't believe me yet that that's the answer to the eternal 'why', that's just because you'll know I'm right when you get to the refreshment part. Austria was one of my pastures. Lots of dryness at times, but my soul has been given refreshment that it will not easily forget.

The Holy Land. 

I'm desperate for a desperate heart.

All that I am is dry bones, without You, Lord, a desert soul. 

I am broken but running toward you God, You make me whole. 

[from Desert Soul, by The Rend Collective Experiment.]

This song was my theme song for a while....good stuff.

35. Be who the Lord wants you to be, not what others want to see. 

It's much easier said than done, but oh, so freeing when it is accomplished. And as it turns out, all people really want to see is God, so that helps. That's all I have to say about that.

36. Study in the sunshine.  

Something I have always loved doing, this habit reached its apex in Gaming. The last two weeks of the semester brought the most beautiful weather in the world to that little village in the mountains, but they also coincided with preparation for and taking of final exams. So we made the best of it and brought our flashcards and study groups out to the courtyards of the Kartause and basked in the warm sunshine that had been so absent for so long. There were always one or two people strumming their guitars for a little studying accompaniment and everyone put down blankets on the grass and set up camp. Peace. I wish it was always possible.

Not studying but...sunshine!